Probing interlayer shear thermal deformation in atomically-thin van der Waals layered materials

Abstract

Van der Waals materials exhibit unique thermomechanical properties, but interlayer deformations are usually challenging to measure. Here, the authors exploit the strain-dependent optical properties of monolayer WSe2 to quantitatively probe the interlayer shear thermal deformations and interlayer coupling in phosphorene and hexagonal boron nitride.